If you're relying on the national "mainstream" media to tell you what you need to know, you're waiting on a bus that's not coming.

As noticed by a media watchdog group, the Big Three networks' early-morning shows this past week devoted 52 minutes to celebrity Lindsay Lohan's totally irrelevant messed-up life - and about 20 seconds to the new head of Medicare.

The latter, Donald Berwick, might be of passing interest since he's a huge fan of health-care rationing - in other words, having the government or some agent of it decide whether a medical procedure is not just in your interest, but in society's interest for you to receive.

Attention, seniors.

Why would that not interest the "mainstream" media? Why wouldn't they inform Americans about the man President Obama is appointing during a congressional recess - so that his extreme views on socialized medicine and rationing won't be vetted before Congress?

"Don't put your faith in market forces," he once cautioned the British. "It's a popular idea: that Adam Smith's invisible hand would do a better job of designing care than leaders with plans can. I find little evidence that market forces relying on consumers choosing among an array of products, with competitors fighting it out, leads to the health care system you want and need."

Right. The private sector stinks at finding what people want and need, and provides no incentives for businesses to fulfill those needs, while government has all the expertise and incentive. It's Economics 101!

Wow.

This guy is definitely from Planet Obama.

"One of the most prominent advocates of rationed health care," is how Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), described Berwick.

Writing in Forbes , Daniel J. Popeo of the Washington Legal Foundation says he is troubled by Berwick's "views on expanding government control over personal medical decisions."

You might be troubled too, if the media spent as much time on such important stories as they do the trivial lives of fallen celebrities.

The left claims that we already ration care in America. Nonsense. You haven't seen rationing yet. Any shortages in the system - of organs, for example - are naturally occurring issues of supply and demand, and would not be improved by government oversight. Otherwise, those who want care in America get it, regardless of their ability to pay. That's hardly rationing.

In contrast, Popeo notes, people such as Berwick want the government to use such things as "quality-adjusted life years" and "comparative effectiveness research" to ration care, usually at the expense of older people, since cost-benefit analyses would often favor the young.

Indeed, says The Wall Street Journal, Great Britain has decided it "cannot afford to spend more than about $22,000 to extend a life by six months." Berwick has called such bureaucratic decrees on your health care "very good and very disciplined, scientifically grounded, policy-connected models for the evaluation of medical treatments."

There's no bigger fan of the British system than your new head of Medicare.

Moreover, Berwick once said the health-care system should be used to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor.

"Any health-care funding plan that is just, equitable, civilized and humane must - must - redistribute wealth from the richer among us to the poorer and the less fortunate. Excellent health care is by definition redistributional."

Wow. You didn't see that, either, on "The Today Show," did you?

Anyone who loves freedom, especially in health care, and anyone older than 50, and those who love them, should be horrified that someone such as Berwick is now head of Medicare, and should be outraged that the Obama administration would cravenly choose a "recess" appointment to try to sneak him into office under congressional radar.

Under the media's too, it seems.